Japanese Doctor Describes Wartime Medical Atrocities

TOKYO - Dr. Ken Yuasa says he used healthy Chinese for practice surgery during World War II, removed parts of their brains and even shot prisoners to demonstrate how to remove bullets.

As a Japanese army doctor, Yuasa said, he tested the effectiveness of anesthetics on two healthy farmers and practiced a tracheotomy. His colleagues cut farmers' arms, legs and intestines into pieces and stitched them back together again.

After the surgery practice, the doctors killed their "patients," strangling one with a belt when he survived the injection of anesthetic into a vein, Yuasa said.

For decades after its surrender in 1945, Japan insisted there was no proof that its military had conducted biological experiments, enslaved foreign women in brothels and made forced laborers of Chinese and Koreans.

In recent years, however, witnesses and participants have come forward in growing numbers. Their testimony and documentary evidence are embarrassing Japan into retracting denials about its atrocities during the war.

Like Yuasa, 76, most are goaded by conscience and concern that the true history of the war might die with its survivors.

Yuasa, interviewed at his Tokyo clinic, said his group killed 14 Chinese after using them for surgical practice and experiments at a military hospital in Shanxi Province, central China, between February 1942 and August 1945.

He and his colleagues also shot four prisoners in the stomach so they could remove the bullets, and extracted brain matter to provide samples to Japanese pharmaceutical companies, Yuasa said.

Hundreds of other military doctors and nurses conducted similar experiments in Shanxi Province alone, he said.

"Most never have recognized their crimes, because it was `justice' to kill and rape the Chinese and other Asians. It was all for the emperor," he said.

The latest disclosures about atrocities began in 1991, when a Japanese historian found military documents showing the wartime army forced Korean women to serve as sex slaves for soldiers.

The exposures forced the government to reverse longstanding claims that it was not involved in the brothels. In August, it released a report on how women were forced into becoming sex slaves, and the government issued an official apology.

Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, who took office Aug. 9, has made a point of explicitly acknowledging, and apologizing for, his nation's wartime aggression.

The government has never admitted its wartime military did biological experiments on living humans. Most documents and other evidence of the experiments were destroyed at war's end.

But Yuasa says that during their World War II conquest of much of Asia, the Japanese conducted mass medical experiments on thousands of captive, otherwise healthy, subjects.

Most notorious is army Unit 731, which researchers say killed at least 3,000 Chinese, Russians, Koreans and Mongolians in top-secret experiments that involved injections of germs such as anthrax, typhus and dysentery; human vivisection; and shrapnel-induced gangrene.

Many of those who survived the experiments were executed so they would not talk, the researchers say.

Yuasa said he was not a member of Unit 731, although he did supply bacteria for its germ experiments.

He said he realized the gravity of what he had done after he was imprisoned as a war criminal. He was released in June 1956, when his charges were suspended.

The Japanese government has denied that widespread experiments like those described by Yuasa occurred, although it has acknowledged the existence of Unit 731.

Aware that outright acknowledgments and apologies tend to invite demands for compensation from war victims and their families, the Japanese government has dealt with such issues very cautiously.